Internet Pioneer Robert Braden Retires From ISI

On March 29, more than 60 colleagues and friends gathered
in and outside the Information Sciences Institute's Marina del
Rey headquarters to celebrate Robert Braden's 30-year
tenure. A true Internet pioneer, Braden was involved with
the now-ubiquitous network from its earliest ARPAnet days.

He helped create fundamental Net communications
protocols, operating standards and architecture, and co-
edited a pivotal dialogue among developers that
helped
ensure the Net's stunning success. While at University
College London in the early 1980s, Braden even wrote the
software that connected British universities with a nascent
Net.

Braden also was active in the broader research
community, where he led or participated on multiple, key
task forces - including one in 2002 that helped define new
architecture requirements for a network popular beyond its
creators' most far-fetched expectations. Braden meanwhile
made significant contributions to networking overall, the
DETER testbed and the emerging science of cybersecurity
experimentation.

Braden in a non-paperless office in 2008. Photo by
Carl Malamud.

He is a fellow of the Association for Computing
Machinery and now a fellow emeritus at ISI. "Bob's vision
has helped guide networking efforts at ISI and the Internet
community at large," says Terry Benzel, Internet and
Networked Systems Division assistant at ISI. "In my own
area, cybersecurity, he's helped lead standards development
for cyber-physical systems - what most people call the
'Internet of Things.' Bob's also been pivotal to helping
DETER succeed as a testbed and research effort."

Attendees packed a festive room, complete with
balloons arcing in USC cardinal-and-gold, in the Marina.
Those joining via web conference included researchers in
ISI's Arlington, Virginia office and other Net creators now
scattered around the country. Among them: ISI alumnus
Stephen Casner, whose multicasting work helped deliver a
Rolling Stones concert over the Net for the first time.
Braden's son David, an educator in Berkeley, also flew in to
Los Angeles for the event.

Next to Braden himself, the most popular attraction may
have been a 4-bit computer that Braden built while still in
high school 65 years ago. Completed after a summer job at
IBM, the roughly three-foot-square electromagnetic
calculator is "a little disheveled" after years of being dragged
around the country, Braden acknowledged. His retirement
plans include getting the machine back in working order.

Braden's 1951 4-bit calculator.

Internet and Networked Systems Division Director John
Wroclawski kicked off the event with a short history of ISI's
Internet contributions, including its role in a then-
revolutionary concept: the idea of open-source, rather than
proprietary, code. He described Braden's role in the Internet
Engineering Task Force, which required forging difficult
consensus between Net researchers, operators and industry.

Wroclawski also touched on an effort involving
researchers at ISI, MIT and elsewhere to define new, more
flexible architectural principles. Braden and his colleagues
worked closely together to outline ways in which the Net
must adapt to support constituencies whose competing
interests far outstrip its creators' intent. That activity that
ultimately led to a major revitalization of network
architecture research.

Benzel followed with a recounting of how, after writing a
proposal with Braden to launch the DETER cybersecurity
project, she received job offers from both the University of
California at Berkeley and ISI. She came to ISI, she said, in
large part because of Braden's extraordinary gifts.

Early ARPAnet
diagram.

Braden then spoke about his own career, which began
with hanging around IBM's New York computer labs as a high
school student. He was offered a summer job, prompting
him to build the calculator, and received a Westinghouse
scholarship. After earning his BS at Cornell University and
MS at Stanford University, Braden taught computing courses
at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University and UCLA.

At UCLA, where he also worked as a programmer, the
Defense Advanced Research Agency offered funding for
packet-switching network research. "We needed the
money," said Braden, "so we had to say 'yes.'" He became
responsible for connecting UCLA to ARPAnet via the first
supercomputer in 1970, as well as a key contributor to the
TCP/IP communications protocol on which the Net still
operates.

Braden, Internet luminary Jon Postel and other UCLA
colleagues moved to ISI in 1986. Postel became the driving
force behind the Request for Comments (RFC) - essentially
the first, longest-running blog - that catalyzed the Net's
rapid advances. Following Postel's untimely death in 1998,
Braden took over as RFC co-editor, leading the community
effort to define Net standards "as a tribute to Jon," he said.

Braden co-edited the RFC with Joyce Reynolds until
2006, then on his own until the Internet Society took over in
2010. He also has served on multiple Net committees,
including the Internet Engineering Task Force, which
develops standards, and the Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF), which examines longer-term directions. And he
created the performance-oriented IRTF End-to-End Research
Group.

Prem Natarajan, Michael Keston Executive Director and
Research Professor at ISI, presented Braden with a
substantial plaque reading, "In appreciation of your many
years of dedicated service, devotion and commitment to ISI
and the network research community." Natarajan had
managed to find an RFC sent from Japan in 1986, and
pointed out how the Net's crusading spirit is emblematic of
ISI overall.

The event closed with heartfelt applause and an
enormous retirement cake. Natarajan also announced
Braden intends to remain connected to, and help document
Net history with, an appreciative ISI.